Fort Valencia !!!

Author

File Description

prayermedoo68

Posted on 05/22/06 @ 02:19 PM (updated 06/11/06)

File Details

Version:

The Conquerors 1.0c

Style:

Build and Destroy

Fight your way as you start with Lord Griel (hero), a light calvary and 3 villages w/ town center. You have 5 enemies but your main target is
King George's Fort Valencia. He is a coward that hides inside his castle guarded by lots of guards.
You must destroy their mosque at the back of their fort but going there won't be easy cause you got 4 more enemies to get past first.

The other 4 enemies each do collect a lot of sources. One collects, stone. one collects, gold and then the other two collects food and wood for a living. You won't start or likely find very many sources so you'll have to destroy them and take all of their stuff before facing King George IV.

Playability: 4
This was a pretty fun game - once it got going. It takes ages to build up enough resources to do anything, and since no-one attacks you, you're left staring at the screen waiting for your wood and food totals to rise early on.

However, once it does get going, it's fairly entertaining; there was only one bug I found - the instructions tell you to destroy the mosque of valencia, but firstly, it's a cathedral type building, and secondly, you can't actually knock it down, which caused me some head scratching. As it is, after you kill King George you win. I don't know if the fact I captured the "mosque" had anything to do with that or not.

Also; my impression was that you got resources for destroying town centres. This doesn't happen with the gold mining lot. It does with the woodcutting lot. I didn't try the other two.

Balance: 3
The armies you fight are well balanced enough. The problem is that the enemies never attack you, and King George's army is conveniently prepared to mill about in front of a line of ships and longbowmen on the grassy field outside his town. Once you get over your resource problems, winning is pretty inevitable. Some people would consider 3 generous, but if I gave it 2 that might imply that the fort needs more towers and castles or the enemy civs need more troops, which isn't true.

Creativity: 3
Pretty simple build a civ and destroy the enemy type game, pretty triggerless. Except for the races of wood, food, gold, and stone, which do present a genuine choice of route to victory. Berserk's become Royal Guard, and the map's nice, so it is worth a 3.

Map Design: 4
The map is one of the strong points. It seems like an enhanced random map. Maybe it is. But there's no silly multiplacing of the same terrain feature or other bad things people do with maps. The towns are fairly well designed, and the placement of resources fits the way the game is supposed to play well.

Story/Instructions: 3
There isn't really a story. You're Lord Griel, and have to kill King George and capture Fort Valencia, and there are some oddly named resource collecting villages in between. King George is also Frankish. At the end, we are told: "Victory for the Britains!"

The instructions, though, are pretty clear, correctly spelt and so on, and apart from the slight confusion about the mosque, fit the scenario correctly.

Additional Comments:
The scenario basically amounts to an obstacle course type game. If you like that, it's a pretty well constructed game. Better players may, however, find themselves kinda bored by the formulaic way in which one can systematically steamroller through this game. The story premise doesn't make any sense, with an army of throwing axemen, paladins, jannisaries, and all kinds of other units, in a fort named after a Spanish town, held by a Frenchman called George. All defending a mosque that looks like a cathedral. So if that bothers you, this scenario isn't for you.

Lord Griel also doesn't need to do anything. All he has to do is not die. So he sits in your town centre/castle for the entire game. If some kind of objective for him was added, especially in the early part of the game when you aren't doing a lot and could use the diversion, that would be a good thing.